OrsonSmelles

Surely you could have made essentially the same point without regurgitating one of the most perniciously derogatory lines ever concocted to describe teaching?

All of the market forces you describe are real, but they are partly sustained by cultural templates that make teaching a low-status job among those with technical qualifications and lead to an assumption that every teacher is either (a) internally motivated and doesn't "need" competitive compensation or (b) a washout from a more prestigious track and doesn't "deserve" competitive compensation. This affects administrators, policymakers, voters, and teachers themselves, giving us the status quo where teachers are paid and treated like shit (ask a K-12 educator about the most psychotic parent they met this year and whether admin had their back) so that even many people who love teaching gradually evaporate out of the field if they can.

I suppose I'm not even arguing that the material result is much different than you describe it, just that it's lazy, amoral thinking to frame it as a market quirk or the immutable nature of teaching rather than a slow-motion sociocultural trainwreck over which we can exercise some iota of agency. (One such iota might be to simply not say "those who can..." in earnest ever again.)

He can be wrong in both directions! Lived experience is a uniquely rich and direct source of knowledge, and on average it's wise to take people seriously when they're speaking from it, but it's also very possible for an individual to have an absolutely horseshit interpretation of their own experience! Maybe it's distorted by trauma or self-serving biases, maybe they're just not very good at thinking, but there will always be someone out there to make you regret putting experience on too high of a pedestal, and sometimes the off-putting book-smart perspective is the more valuable one.

If we're making superficial critiques of others' comments with minimal relevance to their philosophical content, let me point out that meat is defined by its consumption as food and need not be muscle tissue specifically. Brains is meat.

If someone actually joined and org with plans to be a whistleblower

Yeah, I mean that's just espionage and should raise your standard of evidence for any claim made. The credibility of whistleblowers comes partly from the idea that they basically believe in the org's mission and were working sincerely to achieve it until they discovered information that they had a higher moral duty to report on. If they came in already believing it was illegitimate and their goal was to find dirt to expose, then you know they were already comfortable with one act of deception and you should consider that they might be comfortable with a second. It's the same heuristic that says not to take Project Veritas videos at face value.

But you can see the CBRN weapon nexus in your examples that's missing from the Tiananmen prompt, right? Do American models refuse to tell you about COINTELPRO, Kent State, or My Lai, for instance?

That would be Skippy's List[0], which as far as I know is the seminal work in the genre (at least on the internet). I originally learned about it through a (rather less compact) version about someone's D&D crimes[1], which was closer to my cultural wheelhouse, but the original holds up even if you have to google some phrases.

[0] https://skippyslist.com/list/

[1] https://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html

They already ride British nature photographers—what do they need bikes for?

Well, we could start with some ELIZA instances.

I think having a commitment that strong to a dangerous activity should factor into whether you have kids in the first place. Maybe it doesn't make the answer an automatic "no", but I think one has to really think through one's decision to create a person who will have a disproportionate risk of major trauma in their early life and should have an extremely clear contingency plan for the child's care by someone who is genuinely psychologically and materially prepared for that eventuality. I think that to do less than that would be negligence—it might be a common type of negligence, easily obscured by romanticism about bold endeavors, but it is certainly not taking care.

This is the best work I know on the topic (admittedly having done no literature review): https://gwern.net/tla

To the windoooooooooooooooooooow....

There's probably a legal distinction, but personally I really don't want, say, my grocery store tracking how long I spent in which aisles to add to my advertising profile.

(Yes, I use rewards cards, but I have the option to not enter my phone number and pay cash if I want to exclude a particular purchase from that dataset.)

Alternating or stochastically varying pronouns in your examples used to be a common way to make an effort at inclusive writing, usually preferred aesthetically to constructs like `his/her'. (The style before that was basically to use masculine pronouns for hypothetical people in every single case and deny that there was anything to question about that.) I think I agree that the modern semi-standard of using `they' for examples where gender is irrelevant or unknown is strictly better, but it's hard for me to summon a lot of contempt for someone who goes with a different/older habit.

corporate entomologies

Now there's a ready-made Far Side concept.

Just to be clear, even when a human writes and refines prompts, tweaks parameters, and iterates generation until they see something they imagined but lacked the traditional art skills to produce... we have not ended up with art? (If someone posts all 2000 iterates of their last prompt, that's bad social behavior, but it's hard for me to feel like it "un-arts" the results.) Or is there some other generation procedure you're imagining that's responsible for the alleged non-art?

(Lest I be accused of moving goalposts or trying to sound less crazy, I want to double down on my original motivation that I think we need to make philosophical space for minds with agency and potential personhood that did not evolve in meat. I have no confidence that that will become urgent in my lifetime, but I think it will someday and it would be nice to be culturally through with the arguments about whether it could possibly ever make art before we're forced to argue about whether it can vote or join the priesthood or whatever!)

Art has depth, art has emotion

But significant portions of those qualities are imputed by the viewer! The artist has their own intent and experience during the creation of the art, but that only inheres in the art insofar as another mind can later recover some of that feeling upon viewing. Huge parts of the meaning of ancient (and more recent) art are lost forever because they depended on never-recorded cultural or personal understandings, and our emotional appreciation of them today largely hinges on how they make us imagine the past or our relationship to it. I think it's incredibly short-sighted to be certain that nobody does or will love any AI artwork when so much of appreciation is contingent on the mind of the of the beholder, which is not necessarily responding to real information about the work's creator, even when human.

why are you in the comment section of Hacker News and not just asking ChatGPT to generate social media comments on the article?

Because I know the brains generating these comments have rich, diverse experience and a large set of refined, domain-specific heuristics derived from it - that is, they have top-notch training and alignment, at the cost of 20+ years of upfront incubation in an evolution-optimized meat harness with unpredictable success rates (and occasional personality defects). I can encounter new perspectives here that I don't think any current LLM could imitate efficiently or reliably. But if I wanted to know what Fox/MSNBC/NPR commenters had to say about this topic, I would absolutely ask ChatGPT, because those are commodity-grade opinions, and it excels at producing them. (It is not obvious to me that HN will still be an exception for, say, GPT-10 or whatever.)

This is definitely speculative and a little catty, but I suspect a lot of "hatred" of AI art is a) emotional solidarity with working artists who feel economically threatened by it, and b) a personal sense of insecurity along the lines of "what if I love this piece and it turns out to be AI - does that make me a boring NPC/a chump? better reject it as fiercely as possible to avoid introspection!"

I think I'm slightly more worried that photonicinduction has actually died when he goes silent for a while, though. I know it's mostly down to career/relationship ups-and-downs, but there's always a chance it's "got turned inside out by a flying washing machine drum".

I mean, yes, I would love to see a gravely sick institution volunteer, "we are flawed, we are obliged to change, and here are some well-coiffed heads on spikes as a down payment". It's an extremely unlikely scenario in the current landscape, but I don't think it's absurd to think that would be a better society.

While I've said something like this comment scores of times in my life, and it's definitely a necessary corrective for a lot of optimists who don't think too hard about how they think, I don't think it's a useful place to stop. It's not hard to get unanimous agreement with "be a realist!" because it's framed so the alternative is irrationality/delusion. But even among people who agree that the goal should be to reason under uncertainty and assess risks clearly, there will be a spectrum of risk tolerance, and I don't think it's the worst thing ever to describe that as "optimism" vs. "pessimism"! (I fully acknowledge this isn't the dominant usage, but I think some spaces lean this way)

In this context, I tend to read the parent claim as something like, "great success requires willingness to sometimes take worse-than-even odds or pursue modestly-negative-EV opportunities". I'm not sure I agree with the strongest version of that, but I think it's likely that the space of risky paths to great achievement is richer than that of cautious ones.

But those people have generally marinated their entire lives in a background frame that usefulness == worth and (as a generalization) are under-equipped to generate meaning internally! It's not obvious to me that, say, the fifth generation after human labor becomes superfluous will be more vulnerable on this axis than we are now when there's tension and uncertainty about it.

(I'm sure plenty of people would happily jump in to question whether we'd make it five generations past that horizon, but that's not really the point I'm after here - let's assume we haven't Idiocracy'd/WALL-E'd ourselves to death.)

If they won't even let a book in, the phone is definitely in exile - between eye strain, work emails, and the entire internet, phones are pretty terrible sleep hygiene offenders.

From a slightly cynical perspective, the biggest advantage to human moderation may be psychological: it's easy to choose who to blame for failures and often you can push that blame pretty far down the hierarchy to reduce the impression of organizational responsibility.

Are you arguing people can't easily switch between ios and android?

I mean... yes? Even just affording a new handset could be prohibitive if you want a parity of hardware features. But also, we shouldn't underrate the barrier presented to nontechnical users by having to learn a new interface, especially when Apple banks so hard on its (superficial) reputation for Just Working. I think we all know some (especially, but not exclusively, older) people who have just attained a sense of bare competency at driving their iPhones and will invite you to pull that from their cold dead hands.

RealID requirements

This doesn't invalidate your point, but man it irritates me how many states have chosen to retain a noncompliant ID tier in order to avoid eating costs or raising fees. At least my state offers a full EDL so there's some added value, but it's absurd that the 'default' local ID isn't adequate for domestic air travel.

thinking USPS is even slightly interested in innovating

Or, you know, it's hard to innovate when you're in organizational crisis mode trying to prefund 50 years of retirement while not being allowed to market-rate your core service...

Yeah, I've definitely accidentally created packs of booze hounds that way. Definitely a head-scratcher before you get what's going on.